Friday, April 21, 2023

A Very Stable Genius

Musk is a good symbol of an era (perhaps it is all eras, but I know this one) of geniuses being put in charge, doing everything the "right" way, having it blow up in their faces, and never reconsidering the basic premise (that they are geniuses).

A lot of the Iraq war "mea culpas" by our glorious pundits expressed little regret for the damage done, but merely some minor concern that their own big brains had, temporarily and in a very trivial way, momentarily led them astray, something which would surely never be repeated. Also, the hippies were still wrong, somehow.

I suppose it takes a certain kind of person to speak with such confidence about a large array subjects they know little about (I know I punditize on this blog, too, but I really work to not do it that way), and their belief in their own inerrancy should not be surprising.

Plenty of people, including the ones he fired, could have explained that while Twitter's practices were imperfect, there were generally reasons why they did things the way they did, and every little part interacted with other parts in complicated ways. Pulling out Jenga pieces was going to cause some problems.